Elsewhere in information news

The Seattle Public Library’s “branding initiative” has gotten some rough press coverage, and commenters were none too kind when responding to a survey about the plan.

From a thoughtful New York Times opinion piece on the future of libraries: “The principal danger facing libraries comes not from threats like these but from ill-considered changes that may cause libraries to lose their defining triple role: as preservers of the memory of our society, as providers of the accounts of our experience and the tools to navigate them — and as symbols of our identity.”

Nate Silver, the data guru behind FiveThirtyEight, says big data has peaked, and what’s needed are data scientists to leverage it. “Data is a lot messier and noisier than people want to acknowledge.”